Pine Valley Furniture

Current Systems Description

Assume that you have interviewed numerous people at PVF and observed many people doing their work. From these information gathering activities, you have identified the following details about the order filling, invoicing, and payroll systems.

1. There is one central database that includes records of Orders, Invoices, Employees, Inventory, and Customers. Access to the database is achieved through a user interface that has screens for entering new records, editing records, and searching. All records have a status attribute that indicates what processing has been done on those records. For example, an Order can have a status of new, in process, or complete.

2. The Order Filling system has two major activities: Placing Orders and Filling Orders.
   1. Placing Orders a clerk receives an order from a customer by phone. First, the clerk searches the database for the customer, in case their information is already in the system. If not, then the clerk asks the customer for various kinds of information, like name and address. The clerk enters this information into the New Customer screen and then saves it to the database. Then the clerk opens up the New Order screen and enters information from the customer about each item they want to order. Once all items have been entered, the clerk stores the new order to the database.

2. Filling Orders at the beginning of each day, the inventory clerk searches the database for new orders (i.e. orders with status of new, meaning that they have not been processed yet). For each one, the inventory clerk goes through each item on the order and searches the database to see if the item is currently in stock. If all the items in an order are in stock, then the inventory clerk (with the help of the warehouse workers) packages the items for shipping and marks the order complete in the database.

If one or more of the items is not in stock, then the inventory clerk consults with the employees in the workshop who make that item and determine when they can expect to have the item ready. Then the inventory clerk creates a back order record in the database that includes the original order number, the list of items that are back ordered, and notes on when the items are expected to be available.

When a back ordered item is completed in the workshop, the inventory clerk is notified and searches the database for the back order that includes that item. The inventory clerk marks the back order resolved, then searches for the original order. He then packages all the items in the order for shipping and marks the order complete.

Once a week, the inventory clerk searches the database for back orders that are not resolved and reads the notes to see if any of the back ordered items are running late. He then follows up with the employees in the workshop to see when the items will be available and if there are any issues with completing them. He then updates the notes in the back order records in the database.

3. The Invoicing system consists of the following steps:
   1. The invoicing clerk searches the database each day for orders that are marked complete.
   2. For each complete order, the invoicing clerk brings up the new invoice screen and copies much of the information from the order screen to create an invoice for the order. The invoicing clerk also has to search the database for other unpaid invoices for this customer so that the balance due from prior invoices can be added to the new invoice.
   3. After entering all the invoices for the day into the database, the invoice clerk prints them out and packages them to be mailed to customers.

4. The Payroll system has two parts: regular payroll and commission payroll:
   1. Every two weeks, the payroll clerk completes the regular payroll by searching the database for all active salaried and hourly employees. For each salaried employee, the payroll clerk creates a paycheck based on the salary listed for them in the database. For each hourly employee, the payroll clerk searches the database for the employees timesheets for the past two weeks, then calculates their pay based on the number of hours on their timesheets and their hourly wage listed for them in the database.
   2. Every two weeks, the payroll clerk also completes the commission payroll by first searching the database for all orders marked complete in the last two weeks. For each of these orders, for each item, the payroll clerk searches the inventory for this item to see which employee(s) should be paid for making this item and how much they should be paid. As he does this, the payroll clerk keeps a running total for each commission employee. After going through all the completed orders, the payroll clerk then creates a check for the total commission for each commission employee, and records the amount paid to each employee in the database.

Based on the case study background material, on the next slide is a context level data flow diagram for the business processes at Pine Valley Furniture (Orders, Invoices, and Payroll). On the following page, Ive started a level 0 data flow diagram for these processes by putting in the level 0 processes, the external entities, and the only data store in the system. Complete the level 0 diagram by adding all the data flows.